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Presenting APNG: Like MNG, Only Better
An anonymous reader writes "It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs). However, the one advantage GIFs have over PNGs is that they can be animated. There is, of course, an animated version of PNG, MNG, but few programs can view these images (mainly because the MNG decoder is so large that the likes of Mozilla refuse to include it). But there may be an answer coming: Vladimir Vukicevic and Stuart 'Pavlov' Parmenter (of Mozilla fame) have put together a specification for APNG (Animated Portable Network Graphics)." (Read more below.)
"Unlike MNG, APNG is not a separate file format, but rather an extension to PNG. Thus, APNG images are just normal PNG images (with the .png extension) but can be animated. The system is fully backwards-compatable, so any program that can open a PNG image will be able to open an APNG image (though non-APNG viewers will only show the first frame). Vitally, the decoder just adds an extra few kilobytes onto a standard PNG decoder. APNG support is in the process of being checked into Mozilla. Hopefully, other programs will follow suit."
IE won't support it until 2012, and even then, it'll only support half the features.
how soon will such functionality be implented in major graphic manipulation programs like Photoshop?
:P
Oh, and yeah, I'm sure someone will make it work with The Gimp, so don't flog me over that detail.
Join the TWIT army now!
Microsoft holds the power in their hands as to what file formats become standards. Hopefully they'll make the right decision...
Discussion can be found here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257263
It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs).
Now that Unisys's patent has expired across the globe, I certainly don't hate GIFs.
Haven't they realised that animated GIFs only serve to irritate?
Well now, this sounds really nice. I have always wondered why MGN never really took off, but then PNG never really took off either (you all know the MSFT story...). Just never knew this had a big-decoder-problem.
So naturally I was disappointed when Mozilla took out MNG support back then, but this seems to make it better (read: more chances of survival in the real world out there) standard, and that is always a good thing.
One more reason to finally get rid of all them GIFs, even if they are no longer patent-encumbered - the format is still not capable of alpha transparency...
When will we get APNGOUT to compress the inefficient Photoshop created APNGs?
the MNG decoder is so large that the likes of Mozilla refuse to include it
Yeah, and a damn good thing too, otherwise we'd have a browser that's so huge and bloated that...
Nevermind...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
...no alternative to animated gifs or no IP fines for annoying dancing lemmings and flashing "under construction" pictures?
?$!@...@!$?
This is probably a stupid question, but what are animated gifs used for besides online ads? It seems to me that the animated gif is now an endangered animal found only in annoying online ads, or annoying web-pages that were put together by someone with a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and a free CD of clip-art (or images that they stole from another unattractive site). I would not be sad to see animated gifs (or apngs) disappear entirely. If someone can post a good use of apgns/gifs for which a better solution does not exist, I will humbly retract my opinion and we can all consider this to be have been, indeed, a stupid question.
MNG is being discontinued, as are a lot of features including the Javascript Console. "Bloat", they calls it.
well now that the lempel-ziv-welch algorithm patent has expired, maybe they should look into whether or not this algorithm could be used for a better *PNG format.
Most people don't know what png images are and they probably couldn't care less whether they get png or gif images.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
...(mainly because the MNG decoder is so large that the likes of Mozilla refuse to include it)
So large that even Mozilla won't include it, you say?
Uh huh.
Ooookay...
*eyes >10MB binary while whistling*
Its a relative simple upgrade, as it just shows one frame after another. It shouldn't be that hard to upgrade the code in Mozzlia or Opera once the specs reach 1.0
Of course, if someone in Microsoft could "accidentally" upgrade the PNG code, but if they did that, there wouldn't be an excuse for omitting alpha transparency, unless IE is just not capable.
Read your question and you will know the answer!
Uh, no. Most people have no freakin' clue about what PNG and GIF are. Only we geeks know or care about the difference.
And speaking as a fellow geek, if you're feeling emotions like "love" and "hate" over freakin' image formats you really need to get out of the house more often.
Java? Flash? I've seen lots of animated gifs in educational contexts -- showing how changing parameters affects a curve, for example. Yes, Java and Flash can be used, although they tend to be sluggish to load and crash browsers not infrequently,
ur all wrong anyways. he needs to DIVIDE by 2.2, not multiply! :-D
Y'all are missing something. The browser market is dominated by IE, and, if I remember correctly, IE doesn't even support non-animated PNG's perfectly. What are the chances that APNG gets added? And if it doesn't get added, what web designer will use a format that can't be viewed by 93% of their users? I'm not trolling, I'm not dissing Moz, but the reality of the market is there...
However, the one advantage GIFs have over PNGs is that they can be animated.
Surely I am not the only one here to disagree with this statement.... !
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
OK, so I'm lost. Which is it, multiply or divide by 2.2?
How do I convert from kilograms to pounds?
:)
:)
Yeah, i know it's offtopic, but i will show something i like
Search in google:
Nkg to pounds
N = the number of Kilograms you want to convert to pounds
One simple result:
http://www.google.com/search?q=2kg+to+pounds
And the google calculator will say to you:
2 kilograms = 4.40924524 pounds
I love google
The story begins with: "It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs)." No, it's not fair to say that; it's wrong. Most computer users don't even know the difference and don't care as long as they can see the image. Most people don't know about the GIF patent issues and anyways GIF is now free. Plus why hate a file format? If you really want to hate something then hate what Unisys did.
Well, not yet it seems. The image under the "Test Encoder and Sample Images" section displays as a "1" in Mozilla and as a "5" in Konqueror.
MNG includes the super duper cool JNG
JNG test-suite
Phillip
Web developer has been my full-time job since 1995, and I have tried *so many times* to switch to PNG. And every single time, I slowly (and unfortunately) end up reverting back to GIF.
The two reasons that PNGs are unsuitable for large-scale use are:
* MSIE support sucks. It is getting better, but it still sucks (yes, I know this is a Microsoft issue not a PNG issue, but I'm not trying to place blame here.)
* Gamma value variation. Look at a PNG on one browser, and the blue value will match #0000CC, but look in another browser on another OS, and IT WON'T! Talk about maddening... this is one situation where the extra control by having the ability to specify a gamma value is a curse, not a blessing.
Yes, I know there are workarounds for both of thses issues. But the fact that they are both fatal flaws, and both have to be worked around, makes PNGs unusable for every-day use.
Yeah, grandparent was offtopic-but I gotta say, that's really cool! I never knew about the google calculator before.
It even does other units:
"1.2E11eV+to+J" returns the result:
1.2E11 electron volts = 1.92261175 × 10-08 Joules
More about calculator.
Nifty. ^_^
The article says it's because it's too big, but that's hard to believe, coming from the Mozilla camp. Does anyone have more details? I've been wondering for a while why this hasn't shown up in any of the free browsers. Also, I wonder how SVG relates to APNG. SVG seems like a great format for distributing scalable and moving things, although it's not a bitmap format.
*Sigh* It's multiply. Go read the post by Matheus Villela. Then go find a more appropriate place other than slashdot to ask such questions.
First off, I know all about the drama surrounding IE's PNG support. Secondly, I think those that gripe about it to Microsoft pretty much gripe in vain (at least for now). Thirdly, at least on my work computer, IE uses Quicktime to render PNG files. This leads me to conclude that we, the concerned few should ask Apple to make Quicktime for Windows support PNG's alpha channels. As we do this, we can ask Apple to add support for this APNG format too.
No, it is divide! 1 kg = 2.2 lbs, so in order to get the lbs unit, you must first divide by 2.2.
What is the world coming to when people can't do simple math anymore...
...patent number so I can look at the specs ?
I like the way MJPEG enables site to generate animation frame-by-frame and feed it to client. That combined with simplicity and losslessness of png would rock.
There are only two valid reasons to include Flash in a web document: sound (for which there should be a global setting in the Flash plugin) and stick fights (SVG anyone?). Everything else does nothing but reduce useability and accessibility. The absolute kicker are flash intros with the skip button embedded instead of a normal link.
And: what do you need flash or MNG/APNG for if all you want is a red/green-annoyance? To make really good fakes of Luna GUI elements?
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
"It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs).
Wow, for people this passionate about formats, it's a great thing that there aren't any links to PDF files to give us Slashdotters an aneurism.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
I'd be nice to use this as a video codec, I know mplayer has support for MPNG but I'd love to see a DirectShow version so I could use VirtualDub with it, lossless video would be great for video editing... (I might just end up writing a Directshow codec for MPNG, but DirectShow is such a COM/DX piece of crap I'd rather not have to figure out how to make it work)
How else am I going to be entertained by two yellow smileys clicking beer glasses?!
Jeesh.
If you can't do the animation with a gif, now days people jus use flash.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
They'll probably come out with the "WMG" format which you will have to pay for a license to sign your own images. Users that visit your site will contact a Microsoft server and ask if it's okay to decode the images. Only IE will work with this system.
The official press release would be something like "We feel that this new open (to IE) format will provide the much needed protection against web site theft and give necessary control to Microsoft over your own content."
Would it surprise you?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
MNG is as far as I can see the _only_ format suitable for an Amiga-DPaint-workalike in this day and age (no good one exists today except for the astronimically-priced Windows TVPaint/Mirage, and that is a direct descendant of Amiga TVPaint).
APNG looks too lightweight, missing many features necessary to replace the ancient (but still in use!) Amiga-IFF-ANIM. Sure, it's a replacement for shitty animgifs. But can it replace the Amiga-IFF-ANIM7 roughs for a feature-length cartoon?
Yes, much of the industry now uses vector animation (i.e. macromedia's stuff), but bitmapped animations are much easier to seamlessly integrate with bitmapped digitised film. Want a(nother) open source killer app? Take the cinepaint/gimp engine, add a dpaint-like interface and MNG support and lots of bitmap-animation-creation-and-editing features, and several animation companies I know can finally lose their old big-box Amiga stockpiles...
Microsoft recognizes that a new animated image format was needed (after seeing it mentioned on /.). As such they have announced the release of a new standard, Microsoft Extended Sequential Series (MESS).
MESS will be incorporated into Longhorn and will be one of the major enhancements to the Microsoft operating system. The MESS graphics format will permit content providers to render highly complex images on a users system. The MESS format allows use of Active X components which permits all kinds of interesting effects on a users system.
When asked about using existing standards executives at Microsoft responded that no other standard in this area exists. Patents have been applied for covering this novel concept and will be agressively defended. Anyone trying to duplicate the intelectual property of Microsoft would be better off using MESS as long as they pay the royalties due Microsoft or they may find them selves in an even bigger MESS.
Executives were then asked about possible security implications of the new MESS protocol. Executives replied that security is a number one priority and that an updated SP3 patch is currently in the works that will address all security issues. The only thing holding up SP3 release is final release of SP2 patch 1 that is needed to address security issues caused by various linux distributions.
Why cant mozilla support animated JPEG, ie whats called MJPEG, or MPEG with only I frames.
:)
The only code you need is
A) JPEG still decoder (yes mozilla has that)
B) and MPEG header decoder, oh too easy, a few pages of source there
C) add a new mime type or detect it in the JPEG still decoder to check for headers.
BINGO and its done, where are all the smart coders? I thought theres lots of unemployed hacks out there and students, where are the usefull simple things
Maybe mozilla should get ex-game/demo scene coders to write up new ultra tight code for mozilla that would cause ZERO bloat.
Bright Idea #12313: lets mozilla have a coding contest to rewrite any component, but the winner must code it to have a smaller memory foot print, and/or be faster code execution too. Overall winner is by the amount of % the code is sped up by, or the % of ram it uses less.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You're probably trolling, but just in case you're really that stupid...
Read the first half of what you wrote: 1 kg = 2.2 lbs.
Now, quick, what is 1 x 2.2? Could it... 2.2?
I hope this isn't too complicated, but let's go on to a more advanced example.
If 1 kg = 2.2 pounds, then 2 kg (and you can verify this with a scale if you can't do simple arithmetic) must weigh 4.4 pounds. And by some odd coincidence, 2 x 2.2 = 4.4.
Now, if you were to divide 1 by 2.2, you would get app. 0.45, which doesn't fit very well into the idea that to convert kilograms to pounds, you divide the kilogram figure by 2.2, since 1 kg most certainly does not equally app. 0.45 lbs.
What, indeed, is the world coming to when people (pick one):
A) Really can't do simple arithmetic anymore;
B) Can't troll any better than claiming you divide kilograms by 2.2 to get pounds.
These same people also think NASCAR is the greatest thing on earth, work their 9-to-5 blue collar jobs every day, and watch football every weekend. What's your point? News for nerds, and if that doesn't equal stuff that matters to you, then you clearly are wasting your time surfing the wrong site. Maybe you should try this one.
Another advantage GIF has over PNG is its smaller header size which makes small images lighter. A typical 16x16 GIF icon weighing about 100 bytes will translate into a PNG of 200 bytes or more.
That may sound like nitpicking but it can still matter, for example when transferring images to mobile phones.
I want something that takes all the benifits of all the current image extensions, and puts it into one. Will this replace all of the other ones? Or is it just an improvement of png, to overtake gif?
The standard is called motion JPEG.
There are also versions for the lossless
variations of JPEG: JEPG-LOSSLESS and
JPEG-LS
The whole reason for PNG's creation was as a response to the potential doom spelled by the enforcement of GIF patents and of course they took the opportunity to improve on the limitations of GIF as well... but was back in the day, in the very beginning, I assumed that the PNG specification would include animation as part of PNG's purpose.
I think the best answer here would be to enhance the existing PNG specification just as GIF's original specification was enhanced to include animation. Let's not call it "*.APNG" or "*.MNG" for that matter. It should still be called *".PNG" just as *.GIF always remained.
I think it would be a mistake to add to the ever-increasing number of filename extensions that exist out there. Isn't this convention a part of DOS and CP/M's legacy anyway? Filename extensions are handy information to append but only to a point.
I love png, their only drawback being the lack of a lightweight animation mthod (which mng certainly is not) until now. How did it take 6 years to come up with such a simple solution?
Your two problems are easy to get around.
1) IE does support transparent PNG, you just need a CSS hack for it. There are tons of scripts around the web to include the hack automatically, one of which is the 'IE7' DHTML behaviour which fixes a lot more than just PNG transparency, and which anyone who wants to do modern webdesign (semantic and tableless) should consider.
2) If you simply omit the gAMA chunk from your PNGs (pngcrush can do this easily, plus you get tiny PNGs to boot), then the gamma issues will be gone for 99.99% of the browsers. The only ones that will mess up are an outdated version of Opera, a pre-1.0 mozilla on Mac OS, and (unfortunately) Safari on Mac OS X. But Safari is still under development. You can assume that people who use it are keeping it up to date.
You don't include any gamma information with the rest of your colors (CSS), so it makes sense not to have any in your PNGs either.
How many mod points were lost to this troll? Sheesh, people.
....oops....
I made an assumption that wasn't correct. Forget I wrote anything about filename extensions... clearly their plan is exactly what I suggested. So their wisdom is at least as good as my own if not better. Who is the keeper of the PNG format? What would it take to correct the obvious ommisions from the first specification? This enhancement should indeed be added.
Bright idea #12314.
Mozilla is open source.
Why don't YOU code it and submit it?
Thanks for making my point.
I refuse to consider you a fellow geek if you suggest getting out of the house.
I just took a look at the 'specification' and I think it's a great one.
It's not overly complex, it's backwards compatible and it's easy to implement.
It probably will lack some features which would be nice but at the moment I don't see them being spoken about in the specification (ie, what mode of application for the next frame, OR/AND/XOR/INVERT etc).
I think with it being as simple as it is to create an APNG from existing PNG's, we could see this format take off a lot faster than MNG. Now it's simply a matter of waiting for Firefox/Mozilla/Opera to pick up their end and make use of the APNG format.
PLD.
It takes years for browsers to fully support any new standard, so APNG will be more obsolete than it already is by the time IE has full support.
We already have Flash, which is capable of far more than the APNG format will be.
If you don't have Flash, then you can animate PNG's (or JPG's) by using a javascript. Doing it this way means you don't have to worry about incompatibility with the APNG format.
Yeah, the W3 needs to implement a decent animated bitmap format, but the implementation process takes way too long.
The standard way to animated JPEGs in the past has always been using server push (multipart/x-mixed-replace). Mozilla does support this. A lot of webcam sites use this.
_I_ hold the power as to what file formats become standard. And some 4 other guys, btw. Ok, make it about 30...
;-)
:^D
And I wouldn't be posting here if I was an M5 fanboy... capisce?
(BTW, where would I be posting, were I an M5 fanboy? *scratch* *scratch* *think*... Yes! I'd be posting in MSNews!)
C) Don't know how to google it
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
APNG files _are_ PNG files. We didn't create a whole new format (since that would be silly) so APNG files will still be .PNG files. The first frame in an APNG file looks to current PNG decoders to just be a regular PNG. The APNG spec specifies some additional chunks that if found tell an APNG aware decoder how to find the rest of the frames.
fix MNG and make the decoder smaller instead of adding yet another confusing hack onto png which will give vendors yet another reason not to adopt good png/mng implementations.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
for animation, flash works; has ninety-s'thing penetration (give or take)... what else do u want... to be able to say "i am not using flash?"
Several people tried to get animation in the original PNG standard, but they were rebuffed because it would take too long. Most of the energy that could have gone to getting a simple animation mechanism out was spent on generating really cool interlacing so that when you downloaded PNGs over your 9600 baud dial-up they'd fade in nicely.
I admit that I thought the interlacing was kind of cool myself: I had a 9600 baud dial-up at the time.
I lost interest in the process and left the PNG list after the MNG group was split off. I wanted a format that just let you place PNG images over the background at a given X, Y, and T, and re-use tagged images to make cartoony animations easier. It wasn't nearly as simple as APNG but I don't think it was excessively complex.
For GIFs, use AniDisable. It allows you to switch the animations on and off with an option on the right-click menu. (It's almost on-the-fly...it has to reload the page after enabling the animations.)
And while you're at it, grab Image Zoom to allow you to enlarge and shrink images.
House.Out() just returns void. I thought everybody knew that. (Of course, there really isn't an "everybody", because there's no space for them to exist in, but that's beside the point. :)
PNG uses Deflate which beats LZW most of the time. Getting better compression than GIF/LZW was one of the original design goals.
Almost any program that allows you to create MJPEG files makes them in to AVI or QuickTime (which Mozilla supports through plugins).
Does Mozilla (or IE for that matter) support server push with PNGs?
Not that server push helps auto-looping images, and live images probably dont need PNG, but just curious if it does support it with PNGs..
Morphing Software
Animation should be an extension to PNG specs, not some inofficial hack. If it's not possible to get this into official PNG, make your own file format, don't screw with the old one. PNG file checkers will report "additional data after the end of IEND chunk" instead of "OK". That's no good when batch-checking files.
It doesn't. It wouldn't be super hard to add, but no one has ever asked for it, so I never added it to imagelib.
And deflate is already very old. We now have newer 7-Zip format that compress better and decompress the same fast.
Even back then "we" had better methods than Deflate plus filters. But they may be patent-encumbered, or very CPU-intensive, or a lot of work to implement. The picked solution was a good mix at the time (1995).
But I afraid it will be rejected like MNGs
It probably will. Some of the people designing PNG (Tom Lane?) have said that they should be very conservative about adding new compression types to PNG. And I agree. It's not worth destroying PNG's fragile status as an image file format by making incompatible PNG files official.
This is a pretty silly reason for not liking the idea, but I've never been a big fan of 4 letter extensions. Whatever is put out will be used on a large scale only IE can support it. This is obvious. I just hope whatever it ends up being is a simple 3 letter extension.
System specs: masturbatory ego thrust 100 terahertz processor++
This would be much better as a scaled-down profile of MNG. To make APNG backwards-compatible they've just stuck a bunch of user chunks after the IEND chunk, which of course is supposed to be the last chunk. Besides being a violation of the specification (which is no small matter) this also breaks existing code which reads multiple consecutive PNGs from a datastream. In other words you cannot always use EOF to detect the "actual" end of the image as they seem to assume!
The web design officer's site at the bottom of the burnallgifs site uses gifs. Mmmk.
------- Additional Comment #474 From Mike Connor 2004-07-04 09:25 PDT [reply] -------
reasons why this isn't going to block aviary 1.0 (again, posting to prevent more advocacy posting. If you want to debate this with me, feel free to email)
a) the code isn't ready, per the owner of the bug and the person responsible for getting things to a point where it can be added back into CVS. We're on way too short of a timeline to take major last minute code.
b) no one working on Firefox/Thunderbird really wants this at this point (speaking as one of the people heavily involved in Firefox). Thunderbird stopped building with MNG before CVS removal took place. Firebird was probably going to do the same, but CVS removal came first. Its not something that'll likely change going forward, unless MNG support is really low cost (i.e. not 200-300k). At 50-80k the case becomes stronger, of course. The "if you support it, they will come" argument is weak, since we did support this for three years and the content didn't come.
c) Content that 90% of the web doesn't support isn't going to get created in any substantive way. MNG has the advantage of being more ideologically pure than Flash etc, but if people aren't using it, its cruft, and that's the reality. Given the choice, we'd be much better off bundling Flash with Firefox based on the "size vs. usability boost" equation. I realize lots of people don't like Flash for a myriad of reasons, but users don't care.
I was quite interested in using MNG... Not for web images, but actually as a rather good lossless video codec. MNG would make a great codec, and it's already supported by Ogg... You can mux a MNG image into an ogg file (with audio) using oggmerge, available via cvs...err...I mean svn.
Unfortunately, it seems that there is almost no MNG software available that supports delta encoding (eg. storing only the difference between sequential images), so if you take (10) 100K PNGs, you get a 1,000K MNG. No space savings, no point really. That is where MNG really falls behind GIF.
It seems mostly pointless, to me, to introduce a new, very similar spec. Backwards compatibily is nice, but not all that necessary, as evidenced by PNG in the first place. In any case, APNG certainly can work where MNG failed, if only good software comes out for it. It's more likely that MNG will get properly advanced software first, but you never can tell.
As for MNG not being in Mozilla, well that is a strange issue... libMNG supports PNG rendering, so if there were more than a nominal number of MNGs on the web, you might have seen libPNG removed instead. However, since you don't see many MNGs, there wasn't much point to keeping it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And even then, the support will be hardly transparent. (Get it? Transparent!)
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The PNG format FAQ addresses the question of why the PNG format did not incorporate animation. They claim that support for animation would have overloaded the one format. Also, they claim that there would have been a problem of MIME types; would the type for the PNG format be video/png or image/png specifically? (The MIME type for Flash animation is application/x-shockwave-flash.) For the GIF format, it appears that the MIME type is image/gif. It could be said that it should be clear as to whether a file is for a still image or animation.
"It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs). However, the one advantage GIFs have over PNGs is that they can be animated."
And this is an advantage? So by ex tension my setting "Settings: Animate images: Never" in Galeon was, what, counter-productive? Seriously, what are animated GIFs used for other that distracting my attention from the text I am desperately trying to read? Is there any other use I am not aware of? I, for one, consider animated GIFs just as useful as Shockwave Flesh or Java, for that matter. Is it only good for illiterate people who don't use Internet to read? I'm curious, because I think those little light flashing hallucinations on the border of my vision area after staring in my CRT all day are enough of a distraction, I don't think I need a real animations to make my "reading experience" even worse. I would seriously like to know what am I missing by disabling it. Is there some new kind of pornography or something which makes animated pictures so popular? I am just curious.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
What's sng?
Okay, it's a simple question, so I googled it. sng is a minilanguage allowing editing of PNG data in texty form. Hence the above.
Seems kinda interesting, actually.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, then. This is the end of MNG, methinks. The only leverage it had was being The Only Real Open Alternative To Animated GIF, and now that's gone. The good is the enemy of the best, and all. Now that a Good Enough solution has come along, the pie-in-the-sky dreams of the MNG team will be cast to the winds.
Then again, as someone else mentioned, perhaps MNG will become a much-used standard in animation postproduction. Or something.
I just don't see it becoming a web standard now that there's something smaller and better to use.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'd rather have a lossy image format that supports 8-bit alpha channels, first. PNG is great, don't get me wrong, but when people post 500 kB PNG screenshots of their desktops, I really do have to ask "Why ... why did you do that when you could've used a JPEG?" A lot of people have mistaken PNG as a new format for everything. Sorry, but it's not appropriate for graphics where your limitations are very well-defined.
Remember what jwz once said:
"Mozilla is big because your needs are big"
I think this still stands true.
If you don't have Flash
Which happens to be most of us that don't visit w4r3z sites. Macromedia Flash is beyond the financial means of a recent university graduate who has been looking for a job for the last 15 months.
what else do u want... to be able to say "i am not using flash?"
I'd rather keep my $500 and write a script to swap images than save up my allowance for months to buy Flash. Or do you know somebody who's hiring recent BSCS graduates in northeast Indiana so that I can afford Flash?
Repeating frames, maybe? Can't you do that in GIF?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I started the thread. Given the number of responses, and wasted mod points, I'd say it was a pretty successful troll...
While the animation capabilities of Flash have been widely misused, there are still examples of useful interactive animations that would take a great deal more bandwidth done any other way.
Flash is also useful for font embedding. While both Netscape and Microsoft came up competing technologies that never really caught on, Flash and a touch of JavaScript allows supporting browsers (most of them) to substitute bandwidth friendly Flash for larger, fixed resolution images in a web standards compliant process. And while you might think that the few fonts your browser usually displays are fine, the /. crowd's fascination with anti-aliased font technologies like FreeType illustrates the need for properly rendered text. And if I can't convince you, try talking about the sorry state of web typograpy with your local font geek.
Bleh!
Anyone thought of this? Often animated gifs are used to animate photos. This is probably not the best way to do it and APNG won't help unless it supports some kind of lossy compression.
Is it possible to implement little motion-JPEGs in a browser without it adding too much code?
Just asking.
Technically it's not GIF that's losing the image data. Actually it's Photoshop (or image manipulation program of choice) that's implementing the dithering and quantization of the colors (and therefore "losing" data.) This all happens well before the GIF encoding is executed.
somehow I didn't see the AC post above me.
So, is there an "AJPG" / "AJPEG" format out there at all, or could this be created using the same principles as APNG ?
PNG means PNG's Not Gif rather than Portable Network Graphics. (Like GNU = GNU's Not Unix)
This is a very stupid idea. Just when MNG was finally getting the attention it deserves and MNG support for Mozilla is about to be integrated back into the main trunk, some morons come up with a new format which is inferiour to MNG and also clearly violates the PNG spec. Let's hope this thing is forgotten soon and let's focus on making all browsers support MNG.
Which part of "from" and "to" you not understand, 'tard?
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
This used to happen in Windows 95/98 too when the color depth was 256.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
...because the client wants it and will pay good bank for it.
File extensions aren't important on the web; media types are used for identifying the type of resource. So, translating your argument to that context, you are saying that there shouldn't be a video/apng and that image/png should be re-used?
This means that supporting clients cannot indicate to servers that they support video/apng in their Accept header. It means servers can't transparently serve either animated GIF or animated PNG to browsers depending on which they support.
Your suggestion has a very big downside that can prevent APNG adoption - who would serve APNG files if they knew that the majority of users would only see the first frame? A new media type would enable gradual adoption, re-using image/png would merely make it an all-or-nothing affair - something that is very unattractive to web developers, a group that is vital if APNG is to succeed.
But what does the w3c say about this? After all they're the ones who decide what happens on the web. The mozilla guys making APNG is just as bad as MS using IE custom tags.
From what ive seen the specs aint looking to good, for now Im personaly saying stick with the MNG and JNG.
I was annoyed when drivers removed MNG support from trunk, so I had quick look through the libmng code with a view to helping reduce the size of the library. It wasn't pretty, IIRC it was originally coded for Borland C or something with seriously funky #ifdef's added liberally throughout. I'm not dissing the quality of the code, but I wouldn't want to maintain it.
/me Thanks Pav
Not sure why people think it's a good idea to drop a stable, production tested library (which was updated to fix security holes just this month) in favor of an unstable, unfinished and untested one?
Native (and complete) browser support for MNG and SVG is a wet-dream and I'm tired of lying in damp patches, APNG has potential as a welcome compromise.
I used the web when images were fairly new. Then I used the web when animated gifs were new, and very shortly after that, as soon as I could, I found a way to disable them. I haven't seen an animated gif in years. Mozilla and most proxies make it easy to disable them, and there's a good reason for that. Animated images are awful. Let them die. I assure you that as soon as Mozilla supports APNGs, it will also have a means of disabling them, and many people will do that instantly.
D) When I could actually get modded up Informative just for explaining that kg = lbs x 2.2 :-P